1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to methods, systems and apparatus for managing digital data transmission and/or communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies provide potentially large bandwidth for digital communication over existing telephone subscriber lines (referred to as loops and/or the copper plant). In particular, DSL systems can adjust to the characteristics of the subscriber line by using a discrete multitone (DMT) line code that assigns a number of bits to each tone (or sub-carrier), which can be adjusted to channel conditions as determined during training and initialization of the modems (typically transceivers that function as both transmitters and receivers) at each end of the subscriber line.
DSL systems operate over a dynamic transmission environment with effects that may have time-varying characteristics and that can have a severe impact on reliable communication. Such effects include impulse noise, strong crosstalk disturbers and electrical faults such as bridged taps, bad splices, and bridged taps. Additionally, DSL system communication typically is also dynamic, because actual user traffic depends heavily on the user activity. DSL management systems have to cope with these dynamic effects and have to compensate therefor when controlling of DSL system operation. Such DSL management systems would benefit significantly from having knowledge of the current “state” of the DSL system, where state refers to any of the dynamic effects mentioned above.
Systems, apparatus, methods and techniques that provide improvements for controlling and/or managing DSL systems using state information about the DSL system would represent a significant advancement in the art.